A diligently gathered series of personal stories shows a world defined by difficulty and complexity.
An American Jew of Israeli parents returns to Israel to delve into the complicated makeup of that country’s society and demographics.
In his latest book, Michaeli, a Jewish author and activist who hails from Chicago, returns to the adopted land of his parents, early kibbutzim residents who survived the Holocaust. During several years of visits from 2014 to 2018, the author interviewed Israeli citizens and refugees in order to document their stories of survival and aspiration. Though the narrative initially lacks a concrete theme and meanders, Michaeli eventually hits his stride, offering useful, focused sociological portraits of his many subjects. “My goal was to document Israel at this crucial historical moment,” he writes, “and so I kept my literary lens at street level, letting conversations unspool and allowing people to speak for themselves.” On his first visit, when bombs were falling between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, he visited his brother, Gabriel, 17 years his senior, who was born on a kibbutz on the Sea of Galilee. Gabi, a lawyer, opened a whole world of contacts for his brother, and the narrative progresses through a wide-ranging variety of on-the-ground reportage, uncovering a teeming world of Israelis and Palestinians working and living in uneasy proximity. Whether visiting the Tel Aviv suburbs, fashionable cafes in Jerusalem, the West Bank, or Ponevezh Yeshiva, “one of the essential institutions of the Haredi world,” Michaeli reveals aspects of the country’s character that historians and journalists have been unable to capture. “Neither a cautionary tale nor an international role model, Israel is a microcosm, a tiny domain that contains the truth of how the world really works,” writes the author. “The state’s survival will be determined, then, by the extent to which it is able to accommodate all its tribes, creating a system that respects each tribe’s integrity, but ensures that all are able to contribute to the collective.”
A diligently gathered series of personal stories shows a world defined by difficulty and complexity.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-268885-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Custom House/Morrow
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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